Election Day is still over two months away. A presidential campaign challenging an incumbent must already be planning for a transition in government that, if it loses, might never come. This election, both campaigns will be planning moves and counter-moves for winning a chaotic outcome. They are not the only ones.
The Transition Integrity Project ran a series of war games in June to simulate what might happen after Election Day. About 100 bipartisan players from former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta to former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, plus pundits and academics participated.
“The inability to imagine Trump has always been his greatest advantage,” Stuart Stevens (“It Was All a Lie“) told Politico last week. TIP’s players imagined quite a lot. They ran four post-election scenarios: an ambiguous outcome (think Bush-Gore 2000), a narrow Trump victory, a narrow Biden victory, and a big Biden win.
“We anticipate lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from both sides,” explains the post-simulation report. (TIP did not attempt to game out the intricacies of the legal actions themselves.) “The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”
The New Yorker’s Eric Lach describes what happened:
In the first scenario, the results from three states—North Carolina, Michigan, and Florida—remained too close to call for more than a week. On Election Night, Trump’s campaign called on Biden to concede, citing in-person-voting returns, which looked good for the President. But as the absentee ballots in these states were counted, the numbers swung toward Biden. This was “blue shift,” a phenomenon observed by Foley and other academics in recent elections, wherein in-person-vote totals have tended to skew Republican, while absentee voting has skewed Democratic. Blue shift is what kept the Democratic House wave in 2018 from being immediately apparent on Election Night—the mail votes cast in California that fall took weeks to count, an outcome that former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, described at the time as “bizarre.” This year, with Trump explicitly making mail voting a partisan issue, the blue shift is likely to be especially pronounced. And Trump is, in turn, expected to denounce this easily explainable phenomenon as nefarious.
As the votes were being tallied in the game, Trump pounced. The team playing as his campaign called on the Justice Department to use federal agents to “secure” voting sites and tried to enlist state Republican officials to stop the further counting of absentee ballots. The Biden team, in response, called for every vote to be counted and urged its supporters to attend rallies calling for the same. During subsequent turns, Trump tried to federalize the National Guard, and both parties sought to block or overturn results in key states. Eventually, North Carolina was declared for Biden and Florida was declared for Trump, leaving Michigan as the deciding state—there, a “rogue individual” destroyed ballots believed to be favorable to Biden, leaving Trump with a narrow lead. Michigan’s Republican-led legislature certified Trump’s victory, but the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, refused to accept the result, citing the sabotage, and sent a separate certification to Congress.
It was 1876 all over again, Lach writes, citing the chaotic aftermath of the race between Samuel Tilden of New York and Rutherford B. Hayes.
“If there’s a contested result, the only way that either Trump or Biden, for that matter, can effectively contest a result that goes against them is if they create a plausible narrative that is backed up by their media factions that they actually were the legitimate winners of the election. That the seeming results that went against them in fact, in some ways, are not legitimate,” Nils Gilman, TIP co-founder, told Politico. Gilman is vice president of programs at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles.
The first “move” by each team was often decisive:
These war games were hypothetical imaginings of extraordinary circumstances. But an election in a pandemic year with a President declaring in advance that the vote will be rigged are extraordinary circumstances. “One big takeaway is that leaders really need to know what exactly their powers are, and what the powers of others are, and think through some of these options in advance,” Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University who helped convene the Transition Integrity Project, told me recently. “Because if things go bad, they’ll go bad very quickly, and people will have to make decisions in an hour, not in a week.”
The incumbent has the advantage in the powers department, TIP cautions, such as “the President’s ability to federalize the national guard or invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active duty military domestically; his ability to launch investigations into opponents; and his ability to use Department of Justice and/or the intelligence agencies to cast doubt on election results or discredit his opponents …. Participants noted that additional presidential powers subject to misuse include the ability to the freeze assets of individuals and groups the president determines to be a threat, and his ability to restrict internet communications in the name of national security.”
The Biden campaign might attempt to organize mass protests to demonstrate public commitment to “legitimate” process, but more likely activists groups would do this independently of the Democratic Party — harder to organize and coordinate should the internet “go down” in the wake of Nov. 3.
Voting by mail in numbers never seen means “election night” as game night “is no longer accurate and indeed is dangerous” TIP finds. But delays in absentee/by-mail vote-counting, counting errors, ballot rejection rates, legal and street battles are not the only risks.
There are other nightmare scenarios beside Portland or Lafayette Square-style deployment of a camouflaged Praetorian Guard to seize ballot boxes in Broward or Milwaukee or Maricopa Counties. In a close contest, delaying certification of enough electoral votes into mid-December could throw the final decision to the House of Representatives where Republicans are in the minority, but where voting is not by member but by delegation. States get one vote each for one of the top three contenders. Republicans control the majority of House delegations.
Republicans ended up with Trump, Stevens says, through inability to imagine Trump. “So the other 15 candidates running all killed each other to try to get one-on-one with Trump,” he says, “because obviously Republicans weren’t going to nominate a failed casino owner, a maxed-out donor to Anthony Weiner, who talked about having sex with his daughter. Are you crazy?” But they did, and here we are.
What you think cannot happen has happened with regularity over the last few years. Trump won. He separated families at the border and put children in cages. He declared a national emergency on the southern border in February 2019 and diverted Pentagon funds for building his border wall. Wasn’t that illegal? Yes. But he doesn’t care. The Supreme Court let him spend the money while litigating the case. By the time a court ruled the move unconstitutional in June 2020, it was a fait accompli.
Imagine Trump. Hope for the best but plan for the worst. Vote as if the fate of the republic depends on it.
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